The Vice President for Academic Affairs awarded $10,000 to the AHC to grant to University of Wyoming students and faculty for research projects which utilize AHC materials. A subcommittee of the AHC’s Board of Faculty Advisors selected the recipients.

Lee Wolfinbarger
UW Music Department

Wolfinbarger, a music major at UW, composed a score for a silent movie taken from the Sam Peeples Collection. Lee based the composition on the style of music from the silent film era and premiered the score on campus during June 2005. The 1921 movie, written and directed by Buster Keaton, opens with a dream sequence and Keaton plays everyone in a vaudville theater simultaneously through multiple exposures.

View the motion picture "The Playhouse" with Wolfinbarger's score (20:28, 20 mb).

Carol Bryant
UW College of Education

Bryant, associate professor of secondary education, received a grant to instruct secondary education students how to incorporate primary sources into their teaching. The goals were to make the students aware of the purposes, value, and accessibility of the AHC and its many collections, to help preservice teachers to determine appropriate primary resources to use with secondary school students, and to encourage preservice teachers to recognize that teaching is a public enterprise that requires a sense of giving to one’s community. Each student prepared an exhibit based on AHC materials as their final class project.

Dwayne Meadows
UW American Studies

Meadows, a master’s student in the American studies program, received a grant to research Laramie’s industrial history. He focused on the impacts the city’s industrial heritage had on the landscape and Laramie’s efforts to deal with the polluted industrial past. The project resulted in an article and Meadows plans on consulting with city officials to create an interpretation of Laramie’s Greenbelt.

Carol Bowers and Patty Smith

Bowers, AHC’s reference manager, and Patty Smith, humanities teachers at Laramie High School, developed teaching and research strategies using AHC collections to instruct humanities classes at the high school. Using AHC materials, the students created art projects, exhibits, poetry, short stories, and research papers. Carol and Patty also developed an assessment tool to assess the effectiveness of primary document based instruction on student learning within the context of current educational standards. They will present papers on their work at the 2005 annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists.

Amanda Rees
UW Geography Department

Rees, assistant visiting professor in the geography department, received a grant to support the teaching of her class “Images of Wyoming and the West.” The students studied many dime novels featuring Wyoming located in the Toppan Library. The students identified common themes in the dime novels and then wrote papers comparing those books to Owen Wister’s The Virginian, one of the most famous novels about the American West. The goals of the class were to have the students become familiar with the field of sensational fiction and its relevance to regionalism, examine ways in which Wyoming and the American West were portrayed in the dime novels, and to explore the hypothesis that Wister’s work was a “seminal moment” in western fiction.

Dr. James Wangberg
UW College of Agriculture

Wangberg, associate dean of academic and student programs at UW, taught the class “Agriculture: Rooted in Diversity” in the College of Agriculture. Students searched AHC collections for historical photos and other primary sources related to their selected diversity topic on any aspect of agricultural history. The theme for the class was to what extent have the contributions and experiences of women and minorities been invisible and why? Students presented their projects at the AHC at the end of the semester.